Call for Papers: The Role of Agreement in Argument Structure
The Utrecht institute of Linguistics OTS organizes a
workshop on the role of agreement in the syntactic
realization of argument structure, to be held on 31 August
and 1 September at Utrecht University.
Invited speakers: Artemis Alexiadou
Mark Baker
Eloise Jelinek
For polysynthetic languages it has been argued that overt
NPs are syntactic adjuncts and that a predicate's argument
slots are satisfied by agreement morphemes on the verb
(Jelinek 1984) or pro (Baker 1996). Similarly, in the realm
of pro-drop the question has been raised whether a structural
subject position filled with pro in apparently subjectless
clauses needs to be assumed or if the agreement morphology can
satisfy the EPP(Barbosa 1995, Alexiadou & Anagnostopoulou 1998).
On the other hand, it has already been proposed for VSO
languages that Agr is an incorporated clitic. In Irish, for
example, in pro drop constructions there is full agreement on
the verb, whereas this is absent when there is an overt subject
(cf. McCloskey and Hale 1984). Differences between VSO languages
with an agreement alternation and SVO languages without seem
hard to explain if Agr is argumental in both. Perhaps the
opposite perspective, where, instead of rich Agr licensing pro,
poor Agr is taken to need licensing by an overt subject (e.g.
Speas 1995, Davis 2000), offers new insights here. Broadening the
range of questions, how can partial pro drop (pro drop only in
some person/number/tenses) be accounted for? What is the role of
infinitival Agr (or the lack of it) in realizing the verb's
argument structure? Is there a difference between unpronounced
subjects in finite or infinite clauses respectively ? Or if not
(Borer 1989), how can the unpronounced subject in infinitivals
get its interpretation in the absence of agreement ? Can similar
issues and questions that arise with respect to object agreement
and agreement in DPs (e.g. adjectival agreement) be attacked from
similar angles ? Is there, perhaps, a general semantic correlate
to agreement morphology?
A more detailed description of the topic can be found at:
http://www-uilots.let.uu.nl/events/events.htm
We invite abstracts for 30-minute talks on one or more of the above
topics. Particularly welcome are papers that take a comparative
and/or typological perspective (making a systematic comparison of
the effect of the form of the Agr paradigm on the realization of
arguments in e.g. polysynthetic versus configurational languages,
or in pro drop languages versus non-pro-drop languages, or in
ergative-absolutive versus nominative-accusative languages, etc.).
Anonymous abstracts of max. 2 pages, with a separate page
indicating author's name and affiliation, title of the paper, mailing
address, and e-mail address, can be submitted
by email to: ackemalet.uu.nl (under the header 'abstract')
or by regular mail (5 copies) to: Workshop on Agreement and Argument
Structure, c/o Peter Ackema, UiL OTS, Trans 10, 3512 JK Utrecht,
The Netherlands.
Deadline for receipt of abstracts: 30 April 2001.
Notification of acceptance/rejection by 31 May.
Organizing committee: Peter Ackema, Patrick Brandt, Maaike
Schoorlemmer, Fred Weerman
(ackema/brandt/schoorlemmer/weerman)let.uu.nl

******* EUROLAN 2001 WORKSHOP *******
MULTI-LAYER CORPUS-BASED ANALYSIS
July 30 - August 1, 2001
Iasi, Romania
http://www.cs.vassar.edu/~ide/Eurolan01-ws.html
Organizers:
Dan Cristea, University "A.I. Cuza", Iasi, Romania
Nancy Ide, Vassar College, USA
Daniel Marcu, ISI, University of Southern California
Massimo Poesio, University of Edinburgh
Corpora annotated for a variety of linguistic features are becoming
increasingly available. Part of speech annotated corpora are
commonplace; treebanks in a variety of languages are available or
under development; and corpora annotated for various features of
discourse, including co-reference and discourse structure, are also
available (e.g., the MUC corpora). In addition, large speech corpora
annotated with phonetic transcriptions and prosodic analysis and
various multi-lingual aligned corpora are available from centers such
as the Linguistic Data Consortium and the European Language Resources
Association.
This workshop will address issues of using corpora annotated for
multiple layers (e.g., syntax and discourse, prosody and part of
speech, etc.) or combining multiple layers of annotation in natural
language analysis. We invite submissions on the following topics:
o Research that exploits information on different
linguistic levels;
o Consideration and demonstration of the ways in which
information from different layers can be used in
automatic language processing;
o Compatibility of corpora annotated for different
linguistic layers, including means to harmonize
different annotation types and levels;
o Tools for exploiting different levels of annotation.
The workshop will be held over three consecutive evenings in
conjunction with the EUROLAN 2001 Summer School on Creation and
Exploitation of Annotated Language Resources, in Iasi,
Romania. Because EUROLAN 2001 is concerned with a wide variety of
types of linguistic annotation, the workshop will serve to complement
the content of lectures and tutorials that are part of the School's
main program. Registration for the workshop is included in the Summer
School registration fee.
Information on EUROLAN 2001 is available at
http://www.infoiasi.ro/~eurolan2001/
and
http://www.clg.wlv.ac.uk/eurolan/
SUBMISSION INFORMATION:
Papers should report on original work not previously presented
elsewhere. The workshop is intended to provide a forum for discussion
and a means to receive feedback for future development; therefore,
papers describing both completed work and work-in-progress are
acceptable.
Submissions of 3500-5000 words should be sent via email to
idecs.vassar.edu with the subject line "EUROLAN 2001 WORKSHOP
SUBMISSION". Submissions in Postscript, PDF, or plain ASCII text
formats are acceptable.
DATES:
Deadline for receipt of submissions : April 15, 2001
Notification of acceptance : May 1, 2001
Final Paper due : June 1, 2001
Workshop date : July 30 - August 1, 2001
PROGRAM COMMITTEE (tentative):
Paul Buitelaar - DFKI, Saarbrucken
Graeme Hirst - University of Toronto
Eduard Hovy - University of Southern California
Adam Kilgarriff - University of Brighton
Ruslan Mitkov - University of Wolverhampton
Sergei Nirenburg - New Mexico State University
Laurent Romary - LORIA Nancy
Dan Tufis - Romanian Academy
Hans Uszkoreit - Saarland University of Saarbrucken
Piek Vossen - Sail-labs, Antwerp-Berchem
Yorick Wilks - University of Sheffield